Valorem Visions 2.21 – Microsoft 365 Replatforming

Transcript

My name is Bill Felker and I'm a Manager on the Modern Work team with Valorem Reply. And my name is Annie Lee and I'm a Senior Adoption Change Management Consultant here at the Modern work team at Valorem Reply. And our Valorem Vision for 2024 is Microsoft 365 re-platforming.

What is the Trend?
Bill - Microsoft 365 re-platforming is the process of moving a company's infrastructure and applications from an on-premise or legacy system to a Microsoft 365 cloud service.

Why is this Trend important?
Annie - So why should we care about Microsoft 365 re-platforming? Well, for a lot of organizations, it's, you know, benefits that are related to things like cost, security, simplicity and simply modernization. So when we're thinking about working with Microsoft 365 licenses, a lot of organizations are perhaps underutilizing the tools and the licenses that they already have and they're not making the most of what they could be doing in Microsoft 365. So, re-platforming a lot of the times is relevant and it's such a trend these days because people are trying to save costs for those other platforms and recognizing that technically the Microsoft 365 licenses that they’re already paying for basic Office 365 things like Outlook, Teams, SharePoint etc can actually handle and even improve the functionality that they used to have in their on-premise or legacy platform. So, for a lot of the reason it can be driven by cost it, can be driven by security. I know a lot of times these days especially as we're moving into the trend of generative AI, we're wanting to really break, really improve security, and crack down on that a little bit more. So just being able to have everything securely managed inside of the Microsoft365 ecosystem and then also just for simplicity and modernization. So, of course a lot of things that are at the forefront of people's minds these days are digital transformation and employee experience and productivity as well. And when we have simpler systems that are inside of the Microsoft tools that people are already using today when they're familiar with the experience and things like Microsoft Teams and SharePoint, then it's actually easier for employees to go ahead and engage and adopt technologies that are in those familiar platforms in Microsoft 365. So, as we're thinking about modernizing and just making things more usable for employees that's also a big driver of why this trend is so popular right now, because we want to really make things easier for employees and drive that employee satisfaction and engagement.

What is Valorem Reply doing to prepare for this trend?
Bill: The modern work team at Valorem Reply is, you know, working with a lot of different clients to help them re-platform their current systems into the M365 Cloud environment. We've done it with a lot of clients, had a lot of successful ventures into this but it does require careful planning and organization as part of that. And because of this we always tell people to take their time, really focus and really plan what that looks like as they're doing this re-platforming.

Annie: Yeah absolutely, and I'll add on to that a lot of what we're doing at the Modern work team at Valorem Reply is focusing around that art of the possible really and the discovery and helping customers understand what this really means for you, what does re-platforming look like, what can that future state look like and where can we add value with the Microsoft 365 solutions and then thinking really about planning, you know, engaging with the right stakeholders in an organization trying to really firm up requirements and help our organization understand what they're embarking on and then helping them plan for success from there. So, even before we start to really dive into a particular re-platforming project, it's working with businesses to help them understand what they can do with Microsoft365, what road they ought to take and some of the kind of recommendations and best practices that we've got and then helping set them up for success. I'll say as well, in terms of helping to prepare for the re-platforming trends of, aside from our technical expertise and knowledge that we have a lot of what we're doing is helping employees and end users at organizations adopt to these new platforms and that requires a lot of training, a lot of communicating, really focusing on the user experience and our adoption change management team at the Modern work team of Valorem Reply is really focused on bringing that to the forefront as well. So, you know, we're focusing on technically moving to a new platform which can be arduous and complicated as Bill well knows, but we're also trying to marry that with this people-focused experience so that in the end we're bringing the organization and its employees into the modern world of M365 and just having that be a positive and holistic change altogether.